Arranging 101?

In the past couple of weeks, I had a lot of new work to look at and had the chance to reflect on what I've learned about voice arranging together with a couple of other arrangers who have been doing this for years and years. Here are some of the key points we touched on, a sort of Arranging 101.

Hobo Nickel of a Barbershopper

It's not about the talent of the arranger

Your whole job is to create an experience for an audience. They need to be thrilled, overjoyed, psyched up, get goose bumps, laugh, cry.... If you want to dazzle them with your musical prowess, they may be impressed, but not moved. This is not what you want. If you impress them intellectually, they will say, "Well that was interesting," and you'll be lucky if that's the worst thing they say. But when you've touched them emotionally, they will never forget you.

Don't over complicate things

When you have developed a new piece of work, always make several passes over it to reduce complexity and bring out the core idea single-mindedly. The core of what you are trying to express should always be your main focus. A song has one point, one message and it must be relentless to drive that home.

Chords with lots of voice splits hitting the 6, 9, 11 and 13 will sound really cool on the piano, but often don't have the same effect when sung. Use discretion to simplify and abbreviate. What are the essential colors you want and how can you get that with the least divisi? I've said this before, when you thin the ranks with a lot of splits, there is often a weakening of the overall effect and a muddiness can result. Use fewer arrows, and put more wood behind each.

Beware of over-ornamenting. If the baritones are singing a different figure every time through the verse, the overall orchestration better be be significantly different each time. Variations that change without great effect don't get noticed. In fact, if they are too subtle, your singers won't even remember them.

Use ornaments and cliches always, but with discretion. Let them stand out so as to have a powerful effect. Just as with singing loudly - the audience won't even notice your forte unless you've given them real pianissimo. Ornaments must pop out of an un-ornamented background.

Ring the chords

Barbershop arrangers follow rules to get their chords to "ring". Pay attention to these rules and use the technique to your advantage. There's nothing better than the magic of overtones creating phantom voices that expand your sound. A chord with root, fifth, octave and mediant above (1-5-8-10) will produce a phantom note another octave above the 8 being sung. It's magical.

Last week, Blue of a Kind was rehearsing an old Barbershop number, "Kentucky Babe". It's a classic arrangement originally performed by The Chordettes, and arranged by my great hero and sometime mentor, the late Walter Latzko. We were working on "singing on the breath", producing a well supported pianissimo and matching our vowels with one another. As we did, another voice was suddenly in the air. You would swear that one of the guys was pretending to be a soprano. We fooled around holding some of the chords and dropping out one or two of the sections to hear the phantom voice disappear. This is a wonderful effect, and it has the power to touch the audience emotionally. Use it.

Lead the voices

Vocal orchestrations should be singable. Each line can offer a sort of sub-melody, and go somewhere - create tensions and resolve them, leading from point A to point B. Some arrangements have voices plugging holes in chord progressions and can present big challenges for singers. The lack of fluidity will be evident. Yes, sometimes you want this, but by and large, this is not what you're looking for.

I always feel each voice part should be singing their own little song. Make a duet between the melody and another voice part. Then make another duet with the melody and still another voice part. Now put all three together. Then work with that, iron out the difficulties and see where it leads you. The bass should touch often on the root and the fifth, but also let it walk from here to there the way bass players in bands and orchestras do, creating another duet, and counterpoint against the melody. If a line seems too angular, spend some time making the dots connect here and there, smoothing it out, and see what happens.

Each part does not have to be too complicated, but when you put them together the interweaving can be quite delightful. This is what you're going for.

Save the best for last

Keep your best and coolest doo-dads for the last verse, for the conclusion. Barbershoppers always have these mind-blowing tags to accomplish the coup de grâce. The conclusion is the summation, the defining moment when you and the audience must be on the same page, and you've driven your arrow straight through their heart. Competitive barbershopping can take this to an extreme where they show off how long the tenor can hold a note without turning blue. Audiences love that! Here's my pal Danny Fong doing a cool song with a classic example of what I'm talking about:

How does he do that? And doesn't it do something to you?

Reserve your best ornaments, rhythmic figures whatever for the summation. Don't tip your hand too early in a piece. If you have a great ornament that appears repeatedly, create a reduced variant to use in verse 1 and 2, and then pull out the stops in verse 3. Put that key change before the final verse and push your listeners over the edge. Drive your point home and don't be afraid to go all out.

Practice, practice, practice!

I have a friend, one of my mentors and also a favorite voice arranger, who recently described his learning process doing voice orchestration. He likens it to the Elliot Wave principal used to predict market movements. Stocks tend to follow a pattern of 5 distinct phases: Up 1, down 2; up 3, down 4; and then up 5 before reversing the trend. As my friend points out, learning processes follow a similar progression. Here's how he described it:

"You start out and develop an increasingly more complicated skill set, but then have to step back and find you've gone off on too many tangents. You then take what you have and simplify by cutting out what doesn't seem to work. You find that you've cut out some chaff, but still aren't anywhere near an ability to really create something great, so you start to experiment once again. This also produces extraneous stuff which has to be 'dumbed down', but by now, after you do that, you've reached a point where you can tie everything together and add what else you need while sanding the edges. In the process, you develop your own style, much of which is 'borrowed' from the work of others that you have learned from along the way, but hopefully full of some stuff that is your very own."

You can't go through this process without trial and error, without repetition, evaluation and reevaluation, and giving it time to develop. Basically, it's practice, practice, practice!

Note: This blog is published on The A Cappella Cookbook. Click the link to visit the source of all this madness and fun.

De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder

There may be some good copies of this arrangement "out there". Maybe they will now turn up, but some friends have asked to see what I'm dealing with. A picture is worth a thousand words, so check out a copy just below. You'll see why I passed over this manuscript in 1971, and why I waited almost 5 years before trying to figure it out. Luckily, it's a simple song and I have sung dozens of Bartholomew arrangements of sea chanties and spirituals.

As you can see, this is one of those manuscripts that looked a lot like spots on a Jersey cow. Oftentimes, I can find coherent lyrics published in other sources, but not so here. With some squinting, I was able to decipher the lyrics:

A dark cloud a-risin';

Poor sinner begin to tremble.

Massa Jesus come from Galilee,

De wind blow ober mah shoulder.

Oh come mah lovin' brother/sister,

An' let's go down to Jordan.

Take up your cross an' 'ny yo'-self,

An' join de band ob de Angels.

In case you're wondering, that's "... your cross and deny yourself". If anyone knows this song or has other copies of it, please let me know. I think it's probably quite old.

Coded Messages in Spirituals?

There is some scholarship saying spirituals carry a coded message underneath the outward religious message. The message details the path of escape to the North, here coded as the River Jordan. Slaves could safely sing these songs publicly, broadcasting the message and the roadmap among the community. The band of Angels might be the folks helping escapees make the journey. If this song carries such a message, the ominous dark clouds, the Massa Jesus and the wind coming over the shoulder might represent the danger behind as one takes flight, adding quite an unexpected dimension. If you have any thoughts on that, please share them.

The Joys of Restoration

Every once in a while, something really amazing happens. I engrave a lot of old music that's been kept in moldering folders, shoeboxes and the like. It's music that's been passed on for ages. Some of it is too old to sing today, some of it is racist and doesn't deserve to be sung by anyone, and some of it is downright historical, but much of it is nearly unintelligible. And the facts about who created it and when are lost. That's where I come in.

What's In the Shoebox?

Several weeks ago I acquired a new shoebox-worth from someone's attic. One of the SOB alums from the class of 1951 did some digging and found some sheet music going back over 60 years. When I say sheet music, I am talking about hand-copied manuscripts that had been xerox copied numerous times and then have sat in someone's attic for 50+ years. This is not the stuff you buy from Hal Leonard or SheetMusic.com.

You look at this music and the staff lines are all but missing. Sharps cannot be distinguished from flats or naturals. Sometimes it looks more like spots on a cow than actual music. Over the past 6 years I have learned a lot of tricks to restore music like this, and find out who created it.

Today, I worked on a song I had seen in the SOB shoebox in 1971 called, "De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder". The manuscript had a frightening appearance even then - the scrawl of the copyist gave me the shakes, and the breakdown caused by xeroxing only added to the overall creepiness. Trying to parse the notes was nigh unto impossible, so I turned the page and moved on to the next song. In 1971, this piece had already become inaccessible.

Now I approach a scan from someone else's shoebox of the same old song. In the meantime, I have engraved hundreds of other songs in poor condition going back 40, 50 and 60 years or more. I might not want to consider singing this song, but I want to know how it sounded and preserve that for future generations.

Old Songs: Some Better Left Dead

Among the recent find, one of the racist songs was attributed to someone named Goodale, but I could find no mention of him in the SOB records. We also got a couple of arrangements done by Horace Taft, an SOB musical director from class of 1950. Taft had been tapped by the Whiffenpoofs and turned them down. He'd also been on the Manhattan Project before returning to Yale, and was Dean of Davenport College when I was a freshman, although we did not meet. Taft was classmates with other musical geniuses at Yale, including Herb Payson and Edwin Wolff. These guys were among the most prolific arrangers and directors the Yale a cappella groups have ever seen, and their music is still performed down to this day.

One of the Taft songs had his name on it, and the other did not. But it had his signature all over every measure of the music. After going through hundreds of songs note for note, you get so you can recognize the marks of the arranger. But I ramble. But why? Because the interconnections are what I am really talking about. That's why I could recognize the second song as another Taft arrangement.

Ok, back to ground. "De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder". I decided to search the Web using plain English. Bingo - I found the song.

De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder: Found!

Ok, I found it, but this is a song that is nearly lost to the whole world. I found exactly one reference to the song, but it was enough. It was sung at The Orpheus Club of Philadelphia in 2009 to honor Bruce Eglinton Montgomery, director of the Penn Glee Club starting in 1956 who had passed on in 2008, and a counterpart and friend of Marshall Bartholomew of the Yale Glee Club. In his early days at Yale Bartholomew, also known as 'Barty", had visited a lot of chapels in the South looking for spirituals and gospel music, and had collected one song that was a favorite of Montgomery's, and you've guessed which one, haven't you? It's about the wind blowing....

This manuscript was copied by Robert F. "Missing" Link into a handmade songbook called "Songfest", which somehow ended up in the SOB archives many years before I went to Yale. A similar songbook was assembled by Bill Oler, also an SOB, for the Whiffenpoofs that has come to be known as "The Whiffenpoof Blue Book". Many songs from both books are in both repertoires of the two groups, and many are also in the "Songs of Yale".

In the top, right corner of this manuscript is a notation, "arr. by Barty", which we could not read very clearly and up until today had thought said 'Borty'. Today, the light came on and now we know whence this song came. So I share it with you.

Armed with this realization, I scoured my "Songs of Yale" books (various editions), but did not find the song published in any. However, I did find documentation of previous Yale Glee Club directors, and Barty's predecessor was one G. Frank Goodale. Remember the racist song I mentioned earlier? This is the Goodale who arranged it. It is a meaningless camp song, the equivalent of "One little, two little, three little Indians", and appeared in "Songs of Yale" in 1906, called "Three Little Darkies". The title is the worst part of it, so if you read that and survived, you're good. But the good news is we got the song nailed down right to the attribution, because of interconnections. It may not be worth singing anymore, but it's worth documenting.

Getting Over the Shivers

This song that gave me the shivers in 1971 is important in its own way. It's a song you won't find anywhere - it's one of those songs that is not sung by anyone anymore and it's pretty much dead and gone. But I restored it today and heard it and it is beautiful!